A CHILD OF NATURE 



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AMILTON WRIGHT MABIE 




Class _TS>31l£3_ 

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Copyright N° 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 




A CHILD OF NATURK 





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BOOKS BY MR. MABIE 



My Study Fire 

My Study Fire, Second Series 

Under the Trees and Elsewhere 

Short Studies in Literature 

Essays in Literary Interpretation 

Essays on Nature and Culture 

Books and Culture 

Essays on Work and Culture 

The Life of the Spirit 

In the Forest of Arden 

Norse Stories 

William Shakespeare 

A Child of Nature 




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A Child of 
Nature 



By 
Hamilton Wright Mabie 



With Illustrations an J 
Ihcorations 

Charles Louis Hinton 




■ •• • 



First Edition published October, /go/ 




Copyright, igoi 

By Dodd, Mead and Company, in the Bookman 

as John Foster 



UNIVERSITY PRESS . JOHN WILSON 
AND SON • CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A. 



THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two Cohe3 Received 

QCT, .U . 1.90.1. 

cCOPVRICWTc BNTR* 

CLASS CL/ XXc No. 

'••ntix-:'] 








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u The delicate melodies whieh are 

borne on summer airs through 

tin- paths of tlu- woods," Frontispiece 

"Truth and beaut) bearing a new 
flower on the ancient stem of 
time" 40 

"The madness and the gladm 
in tin- foaming cup which life 

holds to its lips" . 



M It would hav< seemed as if 
nature missed a familiar pres- 
ence " 



64 



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My Heart leaps up when I behold 
A Rainbow in the sky : 

So was it when my life began ; 
So is it now I am a Man ; 

So be it when I shall grow old, 

Or let me die ! 
The Child is Father of the Man ; 
And I could wish my days to be 
Bound each to each by natural pief,. 








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CHILDft 
OF NATURE 








I 

IT was late in April when John 
Foster's life, long sinking, like 
a flickering flame, suddenly 
went out. He was not an old 
man so far as years went, hut he 
had lived his life as completely as 
if his three-score had been length- 
ened into four-score years and ten. 
Those who knew him best, and 
they were few, had marked a sud- 
den change not long before ; a re- 
laxation of purpose in a face that 
had always reflected the man's 

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A CHILD OF NATURE 

mind and heart swiftly and un- 
erringly. The quietude and ac- 
quiescence that followed a lifelong 
intensity of expression meant no 
surrender, but rather a fulfilment 
of purpose ; the concentration of 
nature was no longer necessary ; and 
the bow, long bent, sprung swiftly 
back. The neighbours, as they 
went silently into the darkened 
room, were awed by the victorious 
calm which touched the rugged 
features with something of supernal 
beauty. The face had been full of 
an inscrutable meaning, but it had 
never before borne such an expres- 
sion not only of quiet acceptance, 
but of final peace. 
Some of the older men, hard-handed 

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and hard-minded tanners, whose 
life had been an unbroken struggle 
with reluctant soil and uncertain 
skies, instinctively resented the calm 
assurance ot success which rested 
on John Foster's face like a deci- 
sive judgment on his life. These 
older men had looked askance at 
their neighbour for half a century, 
and they mutely protested against 
the irrevocable reversal of their 
judgment which the touch of death 
had made clear beyond all question- 
ing. To their unsympathetic glance 
there was something almost im- 
moral in this assumption of success 
by one whose career had been an 
obvious failure. There had been no 
evil in John Foster ; the hardest of 

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the dry-eyed and sober-visaged men 
never laid any such charge at his 
door ; but there had been a lifelong 
disregard of the traditional wisdom 
of the rural community, sometimes 
breaking into fiery contempt of its 
prudential philosophy and its toil- 
some surrender to the hardest con- 
ditions of its life. These men had 
never rebelled against the stubborn 
soil that seemed to bear nothing 
graciously, after the manner of Na- 
ture in kindlier climes, but had to 
be beaten and broken into fertility. 
There was no fellowship between 
them and their surroundings ; there 
was rather an unbroken conflict ; 
Nature must master them or they 
must master Nature, and they never 
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A CHILD OF NATURE 

stopped work to discuss the ques- 
tion of alternatives. They had 
conquered, and in the conquest 
they found the only evidence of 
successful living of which they 
took knowledge. John Foster 
scorned both the process and the 
result ; he would live open-handed 
and open-hearted with Nature come 
what might, and this was the chief 
cause of his offending. " 'Pears 
like as if he hadn't cum out so bad 
after all," was old Mr. Ferguson's 
comment as he returned to his 
neighbours in the hall, awkwardly 
holding his rarely worn, old-fash- 
ioned silk hat in his hand; and this 
seemed to be the general opinion, 
with an undercurrent of unexpressed 
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dissent from the verdict which 
John Foster had taken the liberty, 
with the mighty aid of death, to 
pronounce on his own life in defi- 
ance of the judgment of those who 
thought they knew him best. 
Out of doors there was a winning 
softness in the air, like a gentle re- 
pentance for months of climatic 
wrongdoing ; winter still lingered, 
but there were signs that its icy 
hands were loosening their grip on 
the streams and fields. In that re- 
mote and hilly country spring is 
always a late comer, and it was an 
intangible touch of colour in the 
sky and an intangible touch of 
softness in the atmosphere that be- 
tokened its coming at North Hill. 
[8] 




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The near hills were still white, save 
the hare summits, from which the 
tierce winds had swept the snow. 
In the distance the circle of great 
peaks were shining as in mid- 
winter, and the hold outlines of 
the mountain that rose solitary 
in the far North cut sharply into 
the blue. 













was a time when meadow, grove, and streamy 
The earthy and every common sight. 
To me did j i 
Apparelled in celestial light y 
The glory and the freshness of a dream. 





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II 

ATURE is not often so 
companionable to the 
higher moods, so indifferent to 
the lower needs, as in this noble 
country, where the land shapes 
itself into such sublime pictures 
and yields so reluctantly its mod- 
icum of grain. It was John 
Foster's fate to be alone in his fel- 
lowship with Nature, while all his 
neighbours were righting the stub- 
born fields inch by inch. It was 
enough for him that such minis- 
tration was made to his spirit ; he 
was glad that Nature did not serve 

[13] 





A CHILD OF NATURE 




his body too carefully ; he accepted 
the hard fare and forgot it. as the 
poor student forgets his poverty 
when he finds himself at last within 
reach of the books of which he has 
dreamed. John Foster could not 
remember a time when the cluster- 
ing hills and the remote and solitary 
mountains had not been friendly to 
him ; they had gathered round his 
childhood as the stars had brooded 
over it, and both had bidden him 
welcome and made him feel at 
home with them. The little farm- 
house stood on the ridge of the 
uplands, and on either hand the 
surrounding country lay spread out 
like a map to the far horizons. 
To the north and west there were 







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long, irregular processions ot hills, 
sweeping away in sublime disorder 
to join their leader in the far North ; 
to the south and east a rolling 
country was divided by rivers and 
dotted with villages. Few travel- 
lers crossed the hill to the village 
that lay a mile and more beyond, 
and for the most part John's child- 
hood was as solitary as if it had 
been cast on an island in mid-seas. 
But the boy never knew what lone- 
liness was. The deserted road, the 
rugged hillsides, the woodlands, 
were populous with life; he knew 
all their ways and had mastered 
all their secrets. When daisies 
were atield he was more active, 
but frozen rivulets and drifts of 
[15] 




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snow found him hardly less happy. 
The deepest truths often lie sleep- 
ing in the heart of a child long 
before he knows of their presence 
or understands what they say to 
him. He has subtle perceptions 
of the world about him which 
seem wholly of the senses, but 
which register the first delicate 
contacts of his spirit with Nature. 
Nothing seems quite real to him, 
or at least not quite complete, 
because everything hints at some- 
thing more wonderful and magical 
which is to come. There were 
days when John haunted the woods 
and waited breathless for something 
to happen. What he expected he 
could not have described ; he did 
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not know ; he only knew that the 
air was full of whispers ; that all 
manner of secrets were being ex- 
changed ; that there seemed to be 
a mysterious understanding between 
the trees, the birds, the winds, and 
the clouds, from which he was ex- 
cluded ; not because there was any 
desire to shut him out, but because 
it was impossible to make him 
understand. 

John felt himself on the most 
friendly footing with this magical 
world, but the thinnest of veils 
seemed to envelop him and maki 






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A CHILD OF NATURE 









vision often gave the things which 
surrounded him a touch of unreal- 
ity ; to him as to the Prince in 
Tennyson's charming poem : 



On a sudden in the midst of men and 
day, 

And while I walk'd and talk'd as here- 
tofore, 

I seem'd to move among a world of 
ghosts, 

And feel myself the shadow of a dream. 




The boy's imagination was begin- 
ning to play its magical tricks with 
his vision, and the most solid things 
took on a dreamlike vagueness, and 
the most unsubstantial became solid 
realities. The world was the more 
beguiling to him because it sur- 
rounded him with mysteries instead 
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of revealing sharp outlines and hard 

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realities. It was a wonder world, 

as it is to every imaginative child ; Yi/n 

and he went through it with eager J/W 



step, expecting every moment to 
surprise its hidden life by sudden and 
complete discovery. The stretches 
of forest, the meadows, the hills, 
the quiet places in the heart of the 
woods, the stars moving in sublime 
procession past his window, the 
glowing of the day and its fading : 
these things touched his spirit with 
K influences so fine and sensitive that 

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ening him out of the dream of 
childhood. Of this companionship 
with the wild things of the wood 
and the bright things of the sky he 
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III 

THERE was another life 
which was as plain and 
straight as the old road which ran 
in front of the house ; he knew 
what it had for him to do and he 
did it ; it never once occurred to 
him to try to escape from it. He 
seemed born as much a part of it 
as of the other world of which 
he never spoke. The life of this 
tangible world began very early in 
the morning and ended when the 
light faded ; and it was filled 
with all manner of things to be 
done ; that miscellaneous work 

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which falls to a boy on a farm. 
Whenever his feet could save the 
feet of a man, his feet made the 
journey to the mill or the black- 
smith's forge or the country store ; 
whenever his hands could save a 
man's hands, his hands did the 
work. He was at everybody's beck 
and call ; and he knew no higher 
wisdom than to serve every one as 
he could. Unconsciously he was 
grounding himself in reality at the 
very moment when reality was be- 
ginning to have secondary meanings 
for him. 

His surroundings were plain to the 
point of bareness ; for the farm was 
niggardly in disposition ; the house 
was full of children ; there were so 

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many bodies to be fed and clothed 
that there was little left for the 
nurture and furnishing of the mind. 
There was no touch of romance in 
the work or the home ; there were 
few books to read, and these, with 
a single exception, had nothing to 
say to the boy who had found that 
another and a finer crop could be 
taken off* the farm, if one knew 
how to harvest it. There was little 
in common between the world in 
which the boy worked and the 
world in which he lived. He passed 
through the first in a kind of dream, 
doing with mechanical fidelity what 
was set as his task ; in the second 
he was alert, eager, expectant, as if 
a moment's inattention might cost 


















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A CHILD OF NATURE 




him something on which his heart 
was set. Nobody could find fault 
with him, but nobody predicted 
success of any kind for him ; he 
seemed like one of that vast com- 
pany who serve the world in silence 
and, having had not such wages as 
they earned, but as the world chose 
to give them, quietly vanish and 
are seen no more. If the boy had 
ambitions, he never spoke of them ; 
when a day's work was done he 
passed on as if he never expected 
to gain anything from it ; of the 
future he seemed to have no 
thought ; he paid for the right to 
live, and having settled his account 
with the actual, escaped at once 
into the world where his heart was. 
[26] 



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His body was often at work while 
his mind was at play ; for birds sang 
over the meadows as he did his 
chores, and over the harvest held 
there was always the arch of the 
sky, with room enough for a boy's 
soul to range in and a boy's heart to 
make its home. 



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IV 

OWEVER silent and un- 
interested he might be on 
the farm, he was alive to the tips 
of his ringers in the woods. The 
moment he crossed the invisible 
boundary into the territory of Na- 
ture he awoke as if out of sleep ; 
his face was full of expectancy ; his 
eves were evervwhere; his body 
seemed to be instinct with intelli- 
gence, so alert was his attitude and 
so quick were his movements. All 
his senses, in their intentness, com- y 
bined to develop a sixth and higher 
sense, compounded of sight, hear- 

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ing, touch, smell, taste ; which in 
some mysterious way seemed to 
mingle the life of the body and of 
the spirit into one indivisible, un- 
conscious, throbbing life ; he lived 
not on the surface of the world, 
where a thousand beautiful appear- 
ances flashed upon his vision and 
then vanished, but in the deep, 
flowing, invisible life of Nature. 
Like the older myth-makers, he 
was caught up in the universal 
movement of things and borne 
aloft into ecstasies of vision. If he 
had understood his own emotions 
or been able to give them speech, 
he would have fashioned out of his 
dreams and the deep joys of his 
spirit a figure as elusive, as spon- 

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taneous, as mysterious as Dionysus ; 
in whom was embodied not only 
the ripe glow of the wine, but the 
rreedom, the spontaneity, the leap- 
ing vitality, the power of abandon, 
the radiant genius of the liberated 
imagination. All these things were 
in his heart, slowly and dumbly 
rising into his mind. 
Those who saw him saw none of 
these things ; thev saw a shy New 
England boy, quiet, silent, intent 
mainly on keeping out of the way. 
There was a dawning nobility in 
the depth of the eve, the purity 
of the brow, the moulding of the 
head ; but only those who were 
looking for the signs of greatness 
i discerned these hints and fore- 

[ 3 ] [ 33 ] 





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shadowings. In the making of a 
poet Nature is so secretive that few 
discover her purpose until it is ac- 
complished. She hides her inter- 
preters from recognition by their 
fellows until she has so confirmed 
them in the habit of vision that 
neither neglect nor applause can 
deflect or betray them. 






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And hark ! bow blithe the Throstle sings ! 
He, too, is no mean preacher : 
Come forth into the light of things, 
Let nature be sour teacher. 

She has a world of reads wealth, 

Our minds and hearts to bless — 
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health. 
Truth breathed by cheerful/;. . 

r rom a vernal wood 
May teach j i -. re of man, 

Of ■■■ ■ ,:l evil and of good, 
I v all the sages can. 





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O tar qo book had ever spoken 
to John Foster. He had seen 
a few volumes, and from one hook 
he had heard many things ; but no 
phrase had ever crossed the thresh- 
old of his mind. In the little 
ij bare meeting-house at the point 
where the roads crossed, and from 
which the whole world seemed 
to spread out, he heard much 
discussion ot' this book and fre- 
quent appeals to it; it seemed to 
be a Pandora's box, in which there 
\ •• were weapons tor use against one's 
adversaries, remedies for one's ill- 

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nesses, scourges for one's sins, 
rewards for one's virtues, and a 
plan of things which was taken 
apart and put together again, like 
a vast and uninteresting puzzle. 
Sometimes out of all this confusion 
of sounds a word, a sentence, a pic- 
ture, an incident suddenly came to 
life and glowed for a moment and 
caught the boy with a thrill so in- 
tense that it was a pain ; and then 
the fog of an unknown language 
drifted in, and the glimpse of some- 
thing human and beautiful vanished. 
The atmosphere was lifeless, cold 
and grey ; some vast system of 
magic, remote, lying far apart from 
anything he knew or felt, seemed 
to hold possession of the little meet- 
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ing-house, as hare, hard, untouched 
by sun and cloud and song and fra- 
grance as the rigid lines of the 
building. Everything was out of 

key with Nature ; the largeness, 
the rushing life, the vast fertility, 
the immeasurable beauty, included 
everything except the stern, ugly 
little structure, that seemed not 
only to defy the elements, but to 
scorn the loveliness and to set the 
teeming forces of Nature at de- 
fiance. 
In winter the bov looked at the 





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A CHILD OF NATURE 

human making, or listened with the 
inward ear to the faint, far murmur 
of waters in the mountain brooks; 
in summer, when the windows were 
open, he seemed to hear all manner 
of sounds beating against the walls, 
as if Nature were trying to break 
down the barriers and flood the 
place with light and warmth. 
It was a great puzzle to the boy — 
this strange severance of the bare 
little building from the world 
which was so vast and beautiful, 
this unnatural divorce of the things 
he heard from the things he knew 
and felt. One Sunday, while he 
was still a child and this mystery 
perplexed and distressed him, a 
strange hand opened the book and 

[40] 







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A CHI LD OF NATUR E 

a strange voice read from it. The 
voice had in it the magic of feeling 
and of insight ; and as it retold one 
of those old, familiar stories which 
hold the mystery of life and are JK&j 
deeper than any sounding of plum- $ 
met, suddenlv the hook came to life 
and the walls seemed to dissolve, 
and with a great rush of fragrance, 
caught up from fields and woods, 
Nature swept into the room. If 
there had heen the stir of angels' 
wings in the place it could not have 
been holier than it became from 
that hour ; for the harmony once 
heard was never lost again. 
When the boy went home he car- 
ried the book into the woods, and 
there it sang to him strange, deep 

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harmonies of the stars, with great 
shoutings of the seas and music of 
birds, and all the sweet, familiar 
melody of the fields ; and in this 
shining world of stars and seas and 
birds and waving grain, which 
he knew so well, he saw strange 
sights of men moving as in great 
dreams or caught up in great storms 
and swept like leaves hither and 
thither ; and his heart was heavy 
with the burden of the mystery of 
life and sore with its sorrows ; and 
the veil was lifted from his eyes, 
and he saw men as well as Nature ; 
not with clear sight, but in part 
with his eyes and in part with his 
imagination. 






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That blessed moody 
In which the burthen if the mystery, 

In a- bieb the heavy and the zee . bt 

.// this unintelligible world, 
Is lightened : — that serene and blessed mood, 
■'• the affections gently lead us on, — 
this corporeal fr ■ 
tven the motion of our human b. 
Almost suspc. ve are laid asleep 

In bods, and become a living soul : 

le with an eye t 
Of harmony, and the deep power ofjos, 
U into the Hfe 'J' things. 






VI 

HERE are three great dis- 
coveries in a boy's life : 
the discovery oi Nature, the discov- 
ery of Man, and the discovery ot 

God. No man passes through 
lite without getting glimpses of 
all these mysterious realities, but 
there are few to whom these deter- 
mining tacts in experience stand 
out with equal clearness. Some 
have the vision of God, and are so 
transported by it that Nature re- 
mains almost unnoted and men are 
seen dimly and in a dream, like 
trees walking. Some are so enam- 

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oured with the beauty of the world 
and so penetrated by its vitality 
that, like the fauns and dryads, they 
are bound to the woods and fields 
and shun the homes and haunts of 
men, singing strange melodies, in 
which vibrate the undertones of a 
life hidden and obscure in glens 
and deep woods ; and others are so 
caught up in the movement of hu- 
man life and so passionately sympa- 
thetic with it that they have no 
heart for the joy of the world and 
no silent rapture for the vision of 
God. To each man, according to 
his nature, the mystery shows itself; 
and they are few and great in whose 
imagination all the lines of light 
meet and blend in perfect revelation. 

[46] 






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A CHILD OF NA T URE 

John Foster found Nature with the 
first pure touch of a child's hand 
and loved Nature with the sweet 
unconsciousness o\ a child's heart. 
It was a vast playground, into 
which he made his way with the 
sen^e of possession; but from the be- 
ginning there were mysterious voices 
calling from a distance ; there were 
sudden pauses in the sounds of day 
and in the silence of the night when 
there seemed to be a presence felt, 
but not perceived ; hidden, but not 
unknown ; in which every visible 
thing stirred and bloomed and lived. 
This strange, haunting presence 

^Vr'i suddenly Hashed into his imagi- 
nation when he heard the book 

W* vend for the first time ; and when 

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A CHILD OF NATURE 

he carried it away into the heart 
of the woods and let the light of 
/ the open sky fall on it, and heard 
the birds singing over him as they 
sang in the pages of the book, and 
the faint rustle of grain borne to 
him on the soft air as it rises into 
sound and subsides into silence 
again in the record of the book, he 
knew that between the beauty and 
truth in Nature and the beauty and 
truth in the book there was neither 
discord nor severance, but harmony 
at the root and in the flower of the 
life that climbs in Nature and finds 
many voices in the human spirit. 
And so he discovered the presence 
and knew that God was in His 
world. 

[48] 




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All this lay deep in the boy's heart, 

but it was dim in his thought ; for 
the real things of life rise very 
gradually into consciousness ; they 

are born in experience and slowly 
ascend out of the deeps where the 
soul touches the Infinite in the 
innermost recesses oi being. The 

\ child plucks the flower with a care- 
less hand and does not know that 
its roots are deep in the mystery of 
the universe and that earth and sky 
meet in its making. It is hrst a 
rlower to the eve, and then, when its 
wonderful relationships are under- 
stood, it blooms again in the im- 
agination; and it is in this second 

J blooming that art gathers it fresh and tT" 

S fragrant for immortal blossoming. 

1 [ 4 ] [ 49 ] 






■BHsiCT;^ 





, the marvellous P> •., 
The sleep I that perished in his pi 

Of II ■ tlked in glory and in 

Foil . plough, along the mountain-side 

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VII 

JOHN FOSTER had made two 
great discoveries without tak- 
ing note of his journey or waking 
out of the dream of childhood. 

And now his dream began to centre 
about the bare little schoolhouse, 
and new figures moved in it. 

There, as at home, John was silent ; 
he did not hold himself apart, and 
there was no touch of pride in his 
detachment ; hut language failed 
him ; he knew not how to speak 
of the things in his heart, and other 
things barely touched him. He 
had his place in the games, but he 
[53] 



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A CHILD OF NATURE 

seemed to be taking a part rather 
than playing ; the shouts, the rush, 
the turmoil, the stir and tumult of 
recess and holidays never penetrated 
the quiet places where he lived. 
The text-books were faithfully stud- 
ied, but they left him cold ; their 
speech was not his, nor did the 
things they taught mean anything 
to him. It seemed to be the way 
of the world to know these things, 
and so he learned them ; but they 
neither liberated nor inspired him. 
Various masters, competent and in- 
competent, sat behind the little 
table with its row of dull books, 
but the real teacher never came 
that way, and the boy's spirit re- 
mained untouched. There were a 

[54] 






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A C HI L D F NA -r UR E 

few books in the little library oi the 

school, mostly of the kind that are 
horn dead ; hut there were also a 
few that lived, and it chanced that 
one of these hooks came into the 

boy's hand and thence into his 
pocket, and was carried arield the 
next day. He knew nothing of its 
origin, of the man whose heart was 
in it, of the spiritual conditions 





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flash of light, a phrase seemed to 
leap out of the book into his im- 
agination. It was a line from 
Burns ; one of those fine simplici- 
ties of speech in which a deep 
thought lies like a star in a moun- 
tain pool. In that moment the boy 
knew without knowing what art is 
and means; he caught a glimpse of 
that perfection in which spirit and 
form dwell together in immortal 
harmony ; truth and beauty bearing 
a new flower on the ancient stem 
of time There was magic in 
the line ; the earth suddenly shone 
with new meanings ; the boy's 
heart danced with inward glee ; it 
seemed as if he must break away 
from bonds of time and place 
[56] 



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into some unrealised liberty ; some 
boundless freedom wide enough tor 

his soul to run at large in. The 
glow of that hour lasted long, and 
as fast as it began to fade was re- 
newed by the touch of another 
poet; for the boy had found his 
way to the singers, and the world 
was Hooded with music. He walked 
on air in the ecstasy of those first 
days of fellowship with the seers, 
the thinkers, and the poets. The 
fields about him seemed to spread 
to the horizon as he ran, and they 
were swept by gusts ot fragrance 
from the immortal fields where the 
vanished singers chant beyond the 
touch of care and time ; the wood- 
were haunted with halt-seen forms 

[57] 






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which the world had long banished 
and forgotten, won back to their 
ancient haunts by the boy's faith 
and vision ; and the stars, as he 
walked the lonely road at night, 
were like swinging lamps set along 
some great highway where the im- 
mortals pass in majestic procession. 
The touch of the imagination lay on 
the whole earth like a light which 
brings all hidden, obscure, and mys- 
terious things to view. The boy 
was walking by the light which 
has shone on the path of every poet 
since time began. The power to 
create was not to be his, but he 
lived in the creative mood ; the 
wonders were all revealed to him, 
the joy was in his heart, the rap- 

[58] 





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W - — : — : : 

tu re in his eye ; tor a new heaven 

and new earth were horn in his 
imagination, and the morning stars 

sang again the great song of be- 
ginnings 











[ 59 ] 




And, when it chanced 
That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill, 
Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung 
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise 
Has carried far into his heart the voice 
Of mountain torrents ; or the visible scene 
Would enter unawares into his mind 
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, 
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received 
Into the bosom of the steady lake. 




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VIII 

Tl I E poets sit beside the tree 
of life, and one cannot learn 
their songs without learning also the 
sorrow and joy, the strife and peace, 
the work and rest, the hate and 
love, the loss and gain which make 
Up the human story. 
In the lonelv countryside the soli- 
tary boy entered into the rich 
experience of the race; commit- 
ted its crimes, fought its battle-, 
suffered its defeats, was bruised 
by its sorrows, and borne aloft 
on the >trong wings of its great 
aspiration^. He looked into the 

[ 63 ] 




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heart of the past through eyes 
that had the searching insight of 
genius behind them. The passion 
of the race, which has borne so 
many great spirits on mounting 
waves of power and dragged so 
many down to the very gates of 
hell, encompassed him, and he un- 
derstood for the first time what tre- 
mendous forces contend with man 
in the making of that personality 
which in turn makes destiny. 
Among all those who saw John 
Foster in those days no one knew 
what was moving within him, least 
of all they of his own household ; 
for youth is a mystery save to the 
poets ; and its rapture, its passion, 
its dreaming of the time that is to 

[6 4 ] 





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he — the madness and the gladness 

in the foaming cup which lite holds 
to its lips — pass unnoted In' those 
who live under the Name roof. 
In silence and solitude the soul 
comes to its own ; in silence and 
solitude it passes through the ulti- 
mate gate into the final mystery. 
Hut there was no sense of loneli- 
ness in the hoy's life in those 
days when he was discovering what 
i- in men, and striving to rind 
how this knowledge was one with 
the knowledge of Nature and of 
God. He was swept out himself 
by the tides of emotion, impulse 
and vitality from the Infinite which 
flowed in upon him as the sea 
corner sweeping in upon the land. 
[ 5 ] [ 6 S ] 







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He lacked near companionship, but 
he was making friends with human- 
ity, and Nature was rinding place 
and speech for him. 



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He sang of love, with quiet blending, 
Slow to begin, and never ending ; 
Of serious faith, and inward glee ; 
That teas the Song — the Song for me J 




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IX 

THERE was one other dis- 
covery awaiting him when 
boyhood had broadened into youth. 
He made it unconsciously, as he 

had made all the other discoveries. 
A seed fell into his heart unawares, 
and he awoke one day and found 
the flower of love blooming there, 
shy, delicate, and fragrant ; hidden, 
like the arbutus, in sweet obscurity, 



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A CHILD OF NATURE 

whole being. On the instant he 
understood many things which the 
poets had told him in a language he 
had not learned. He was a born 
lover, being of a pure mind and a 
rich imagination ; and he wore the 
crown of life in silent blissfulness. 
He could not have spoken if he 
would, for speech was denied him ; 
but his nature was atune and, like 
a sensitive harp, vibrated at every 
touch of the unseen ringers. She 
played upon him and did not hear 
the music. Born to feel and to 
know rather than to speak and to 
act, for him love meant not passion, 
but surrender. He gave everything, 
and the great law was worked out 
in him ; for he regained what he 

[70] 





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ILD F NATUR E 

v had given, increased a thousandfold. 
There was a shrine in his soul and 

there was perpetual adoration there, 
and he became like the beautiful 
soul he worshipped ; slowly trans- 
formed by the creative power ot 
that divine passion of which re- 
ligion and art and service are the 
witnesses, and from which all holy 
and perfect and beautiful thoughts, 
g words, deeds, and works are born. 
The tumult barely touched his 
senses, but set the imagination 
aflame. The sensitive face ot the 
New England girl caught the glow 
of the morning, in which for the 
first time the young man, passing 
swiftly out of boyhood, saw the 
reat world shining in the order 

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and beauty of immortal love. Every 
common thing turned to gold in 
that light ; every impure thought 
vanished, for Una was passing that 
way. In the depths of his heart 
there-were stirrings of deep human 
feelings which knit him to his fel- 
lows in the silent brotherhood of 
universal experience. To love one 
human soul is to have the capacity 
to love all ; and through a great 
affection for the friend at his side a 
man reaches out and touches hands 
with his remotest human kin. The 
miracle of love, which turns human 
clay into the semblance and shape 
of divinity, once wrought in a man's 
heart ripens swiftly or slowly into 
infinite compassion and the capacity 



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tor sacrifice. It was not in John 
Foster's nature to round out experi- 
ence by expression or action ; he 

was born to see, to think, and to feel, 
hut not to speak or act. The depths 
ol his soul were moved, hut the 
trembling of the waters was unseen 
and inaudible. The love which rilled 
his soul was as pure as the fragrance 
ot a flower or of the unstained sky ; 
hut lacking the kindling touch of 
passion, to which the harp of life 
vibrates into the most enchanting 
music, it remained a song without 
words ; one of those unheard melo- 
dies of which the audible music of 
the world is but an echo. The 
wonder-working stirring of the im- 
agination when the senses are aglow, 

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which renews in every generation 
the creative mood and brings back 
the creative moment, was denied 
him ; but all that love means short 
of its ultimate surrender and its final 
fruition he knew. Its purity, devo- 
tion, exaltation, were his ; its trans- 
lation out of the isolation of rapture 
into the deeper joy of perfect com- 
panionship in days and works, in 
the visions and tasks which are ap- 
pointed to all those who would 
make the journey of life to the very 
end, he did and could not know. 
He was a worshipper from afar ; 
and the goddess passed his way with- 
out knowing that he had looked 
and seen and loved. 

[74] 

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And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves, 

Think not of any severing of our love ' 

Yet in my heart of hearts I feel sour might ; 

I only have relinquished one delight 

To live beneath sour more habitual >: 







A LIFE that silently expands 
through vision and thought 
and is undisturbed by the tumult 
of action keeps no reckoning ot 
time ; tor the days define themselves 
sharply in the consciousness of those 
only whose tasks are set for special 
reasons and whose work is assigned 
by the clock. John Foster's life 
was so essentially subjective that the 
divisions of time made for toilers 
of the hour had no existence for 
him ; days and years flowed past 
3 him in one unbroken current, the 
shadows of the trees cooling the 

[77] 












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quiet waters in summer and the 
stars moving with them in winter. 
As time went on the early reserve 
deepened and the early silence was 
more rarely hroken. It was not 
the life of a recluse who wished 
to escape from his fellows ; it was 
rather the life of a man who was 
denied the gift of speech. The 
gentleness of the face, the kindli- 
ness of the eyes, the habitual care 
for others, showed the fellowship 
of this reticent soul with those to 
whom he was bound by ties of 
kinship or of neighbourhood. The 
work on the farm was never inter- 
mitted ; there were no journeys be- 
yond the mountains ; for while the 
man's thoughts wandered far, his 





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feet aever strayed outside the limits 

of the great uplands on which he 
was horn. Changes came, as they 
will come alike to those who sit at 
the fireside and to those who travel. 
One alter another the children who 
grew up under the root sought the 
larger opportunities of more active 
communities; the family shrunk un- 
til John alone of the younger gen- 
eration remained. Then the father 
and mother died; there were hrief 
home-comings, when the elders 
were carried beyond the familiar 
walls into the wide friendliness oi 
the fields ; and then the house be- 
came silent again, and John was J. 
left to that seclusion which for him 
meant the richest companionship 

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The farm was looked after, but it was 
a secondary interest; the silent man 
loved his bit of the landscape more 
than he loved the crops it bore. 
Idealist as he was to the very heart, 
he was saved from material disaster 
by habits of industry and thrift, 
which, as in many another case, 
kept the flower of the spirit well 
shielded from keen winds and bit- 
ter frosts. 

The splendour slowly softened, as 
youth vanished, into a tender beauty 
which touched the heart of the 
man as the earlier glory had touched 
his imagination. Thoughts too 
deep either for laughter or for tears 
kept company with him at work 
in his fields or at rest in the woods. 









A CHILD OF NATl'RE 

;^$ It seemed to him as if the splen- ^ 
dour which once lay on the surface 
of the world had not vanished, but 
silently sunk into the heart of 

things and radiated thence in a 
beauty more tender and pervading. 

He learned the artist's secret of 
rinding and keeping all things fresh 
to his eve and imagination ; as the 
glow of youth faded he found the de- 
parting loveliness reappearing in the 
form and shape and meaning of com- 
mon things ; thus gradually exchang- 
ing sight, which may grow dim, 
for vision which becomes clearer 
and more direct as the years go by. 
So he kept the fairyland of his early 
dreams at his doorstep, and trans- 
lated the great speech of the poets 
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into his own homely, every-day 
utterance. He had mastered the 
art of life ; for he had learned that 
the purest idealism may be kept 
untarnished in daily dealing with 
homely cares and common work. 
When the first kindling glow of 
the senses began to fail he held 
aloft the steady light of the imagi- 
nation, and for him the world never 
ceased to glow and bloom and ripen 
in the large purpose of God. This 
discovery kept him in touch with 
Spenser and Shakespeare and Keats ; 
and he found with Emerson that 
wherever a man stands the whole 
arch of the sky is over him. 
John Foster, in his passion for the 
stars, did not trip and fall to the 

[82] 




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ground over common duties ; he 
kept his footing amid homely cares 
and in familiar relations, and so his 
vision remained undimmed. His 
neighbours knew him to be kindly 
and simple and industrious; they 
thought him lacking in ambition ; ///A 
he cared little for new methods and 
his talk about the staple topics of 
a tanning community was of the 
briefest. From the standpoint of 
local opinion he was trustworthy 
and industrious, but he was not suc- 
cessful. To his hard-handed and 
hard-headed neighbours he was an 
amiable ne'er-do-weel ; a man of 
s who could not 








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management, and he was a very in- 
different farmer. 

If he knew the neighbourhood 
opinion he was not oppressed by it. 
His life was so entirely the unfold- 
ing of the inward spirit, his stand- 
ards were so far above local ideals, 
his manner of life was so individual, 
that without being self-centred he 
was independent of his surroundings ,• 
he was a rustic whose occupations 
were of the farm, but whose inter- 
ests were of the world. It is wise 
to know neighbourhood opinion 
and to regard it for correction, ad- 
monition, and reproof; but he who 
would possess his own soul must 
live outside his neighbourhood. It 
was precisely at this point that 
[84] 






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A CHILD OF NATURE 

the indifferent tanner parted com- 
pany with neighbours; they hail 
only the vocation of the hands ; he 

had also the avocation of the spirit. 









XI 



The Clouds that gather round the setting sun 
I) take a sober colouring from an eye 
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortali 

hath been, and other palms are won, 
■ nks to the human heart by which we //: , 
".ks to its tenderness, its joss and fears. 
To me the meanest flower that blows can give 
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. 





XI 

N his later years he found a 
new source of companionship. 
Denied the gift of speech, by which 
men not only carry their thought 
outside their own personalities by 
giving it ultimate form, but keep 
the record of their own experience, 
and thus continually reinforce the 
creative energy of personality, Fos- 







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saved by the discovery that if he 
could not give his thought full flow 
and volume, he could at least keep 
a record of it ; a kind of tally of ex- 
perience. In these years of search- 
ing observation, of deep reading, of 
quiet meditation, the world had 
gradually become clear to his im- 
agination in its vast and infinitely 
diversified life. As a student he 
had lived in many ages, explored 
many countries, seen many cities, 
heard many languages, and pene- 
trated many experiences ; as a lover 
of Nature he had learned many se- 
crets of woods and fields and chang- 
ing skies ; as a sensitive, responsive, 
meditative man he had come to 
know life deeply and with sanity 
[90] 



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of insight. What other men would 
have called a philosophy or general 
scheme of things was to him simply 
knowledge of life borne in from 
main- sources, gained tar more by 
the very commonplace process of 
living than by any unusual process 
of thinking, distilled by time out 
of the rich substance of experience. 
Slowly but steadily the great order 
o\ the world revealed itself to him, 
and he found his own place in it ; 
as he touched it at many points in 
ever-deepening harmony ot rela- 
tionship his nature was fertilised ; 
tor whenever a man touches that 
order which is the hem o\ the gar- 
ment o{ God, vitality passes into 
him. Patientlv and reverently wait- 

[91] 







A CHILD OF NATURE 




ing upon God, he was enriched and 
inspired with glimpses of truth, in- 
sights into life, visions of beauty. 
The cares of the world did not wait 
by his door when he passed out of 
his home into the wide domain of 
Nature ; the tumult of the world 
did not drown the delicate melodies 
which float over sun-swept fields or 
are borne on summer airs through 
the unthronged paths of the woods ; 
the work of the world did not ex- 
haust and benumb the responsive 
power of his spirit when mysterious 
influences, rising like exhalations 
out of the pure deeps of his nature, 
touched him like chords of faint 
melody and set his spirit 
with the divine harmon 

[92] 







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A C HI L n l : NslT UR E 



heart of things. He was free; he 
was sane; he had silence, solitude, 

and the pure heart; and the world 
spoke to him : these are always the 

simple annals of the seers and poets. 
This continual flowering of thought 
in his mind came at last to have a 

record ; for he formed a habit o\ 
keeping a register of his thoughts. 
It was a skeleton report ; a bare 
outline ; for some defect in his na- 
ture kept him from any approach to 
free expression. He was content 
to make signs ; to keep a tew brief 
data; a running account of the 
things he saw, heard, felt, and 
thought. As he grew older this 
history of his spirit grew, not fuller, 
but more exact and definite; it was 








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)\ made up of slight but well-defined 
tracings of his course through the 
mysterious world of his journeying. 
If the little note-books in which 
this record was kept had fallen into 
the hands of an unimaginative man, 
they would have seemed but a con- 
fusion of abrupt and incomplete 
phrases ; a man of insight, finding 
the key to their revelations, would 
have seen in them the stuff of 
which wonder-books are made ; the 
star dust of great truths, the pollen 
of the imperishable flowering of 
imagination, the seeds of brave 
deeds ; such gathering of treasure, 
in a word, as befalls the man who 
travels through a universe alight 
with the splendour of God and 

[94] 

















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/ CHILI) OF NATURE 

throbbing with His measureless life. 
It was the stuff of immortal life 

which found its way through Fos- 
ter's rich hut silent personality into 

this record of his experience ; it 
was the stuff, therefore, of which 
literature is made. For literature 
is not fashioned out of hand ; its 
substance is secreted slowly and 
silently in the depths of the spirit 
out of all its passions, sorrows, toils, 
cares, and works, with flashing of 
Stars sinking unawares into its heart, 
and great swelling harmonies bear- 
ing it onward in those infrequent 
ecstasies which sometimes lift it 
above itself. In simplicity and sin- 
cerity, with no thought oi the read- 
ing of other eyes, as genuinely and 
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quietly as he lived, John Foster kept 
the record of his soul. And when 
he died it lay in his desk with the 
much-worn books in which for 
years he had kept his accounts with 
the seedsman and storekeeper. And 
there, side by side, through the 
months when the old house was 
tenantless lay these two records of 
a man's history as the owner of a 
few acres and the possessor also of 
that sublime landscape which is the 
foreground of man's immortality. 




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Thy thoughts and feelings shall not die, 

leave thee, when gray hairs are nigh, 
A melancholy slave ,• 
But an old age serene and bright ', 
And lovely as a Lapland night , 
Shall lead thee to th\ grave. 






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XII 

APRIL slowly drifted over the 
mountain skies into May, 
and May, touched with the first 
delicate bloom of the tender North- 
ern summer, ripened into June, and 
life crept to the door of the old ±2^ 
house where John Foster had al- 
ways met it with a smile, and 
climbed to the windows, and bud- 
ded and bloomed in the old garden, 
where a few familiar and friendly 
flowers had always lived on inti- 
mate terms with the silent man ; 
but there was no response to the 
beauty which enfolded the deserted 

[99] 






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A CHILD OF NATURE 

house. The hand of Nature was 
on the latch, but the door remained 
shut. If one who had known the 
love of the man for this radiant and 
fragrant world and the caressing 
gentleness of that world, had taken 
thought of the circumstances, it 
would have seemed as if Nature 
missed a familiar presence and were 
feeling for it with sensitive tendrils, 
and striving to recall it with voices 
that were musical, murmurs on the 
fragrant breath of summer. The 
wide landscape softened, grew ten- 
der, stirred with the rising tide of 
life, and broke at last into verdure 
and bloom, all the hidden springs 
of vitality overflowing in green 
rivulets or rich masses of foliage ; 

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hut the house remained silent and 
tenantless. Seed-time passed into 
harvest and the ancient miracle w 
wrought again : hut in the un- 
opened house, to which the sun 
found access only for a tew slender 
beams, the record of Foster's life lay 
like a seed buried in the ground, 
beyond the reach oi warmth and 
light. 

In October, when the banners of 
the retreating hosts were flaming 
on the hills, the closed windows 
were suddenly opened and the door 
swung wide for a new tenant. The 
farmer folk were at their wits' ends 
to classify him, for his like had 
never been seen in that country be- 
fore save in so 



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summer sightseers. He was young ; 
there was that air of being on easy 
terms with the world which can 
neither be counterfeited nor con- 
cealed ; his figure, face, bearing, 
manner, and dress bore unmistak- 
able testimony to largeness of op- 
portunity and ripeness of taste. 
From the local point of view he 
was an idler ; for he made no show 
of interest in the farm ; and no one 
saw the trace of any kind of work 
on hands or face. He was simple, 
unaffected, and friendly ; but he 
was even more detached from the 
life of the community than John 
Foster had been. Foster had never 
spoken out ; he had never acquired 
the use of speech ; the new tenant 
[ io2 ] 




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A CHILD OF NATURE 












of the old house had had access to 
so many kinds oi knowledge, had 
seen life in so many diverse aspects 
and in so many places that his in- 
dividuality had been buried for the 
time under a mass of unassimilated 
learning and half-understood ex- 
perience-. To Foster lite had been 
niggardly in its gifts of outward ex- 
perience ; to Ralph Parkman life 
a had been lavish ; the one reached 
order, clearness, beauty by the un- 
folding of his own nature ; the 
other was to attain these ultimate 
ends of living by a rich process of 
assimilation. To the one had been 
given the clear vision, the deep con- 
viction, the inward harmony ; to 
the other freedom, fluency, and 

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beauty of expression. The one 
lacked words, the other lacked the 
inward unity of thought and knowl- 
edge which charges words with 
meaning and gives them wings for 
flight into the highest regions of 
expression. 

There was a touch of genius in 
Ralph Parkman ; that beautiful 
grace which seems to be the 
flower of ancestral toil ; as if for- 
gotten generations had worked, m 
that presently, as out of a rich soil, 
one human soul might blossom 
spontaneously, radiantly, with the 
divine unconsciousness of the flow- 
ers of the field. And conditions 
had made it easy for the ardent 
young spirit to bask in the sun and 
[ 104] 







A CHILL 



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pluck the fruits by the lifting of 
the hand which others gain by toil 
and self-denial and pain. While 
his fellows were besieging fortune 
with prayers and offerings and sac- 
rifices she turned on him her 
indifferent glance, and straightway 
there was a smile on the face of 
fate; she ran before him, and the 
way blossomed with opportunity 
and pleasure. There was a vein of 
native vigor in him, or he would 
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him by force, apparently, of his own 
inward attraction. He loved study, 
art, travel ; and he went free-footed 
and sure-footed through a world 
which set its choice food and wine 
before him wherever he chose to 
tarry. He was thirty years old 
when he opened the door of John 
Foster's bare little study, and he 
had awakened more hopes than 
gather about most men in the full 
course of a lifetime. He knew so 
much, had seen so many things, 
lived in so many cities, made so 
many friends, spoke so many lan- 
guages, and was gifted with such su- 
perb vitality and such ease and grace 
that he seemed capable of all things, 
and had become a glorious promise. 
[106] 



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* A C HI L D F N A T UR E 

His had been a golden youth, and 

now that it was passing from him, 
; Ralph Parkman was becoming 

' aware of the peril of his position. 
He had given a draft for an unlim- 
ited sum on the future ; could he 
meet it when the day of payment 
came? Everything solicited him, 
but no voice had spoken to his 

spirit ; he could turn his hand to §£ 

H 
many things, but no art had laid 

its deep compulsion on him; he 

had passed through many Melds of 

knowledge, and his inward life had 

grown rich by acquisition, but 

there was no building power in his 

soul, no divine necessity striving in 

his heart for place and tool and 

speech. Many things spoke through 

[ JO" ] 










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A CHILD OF NATURE 

him ; but he remained silent. 
When this knowledge of the dis- 
parity between his material and his 
organising power became clear 
there was a tumult in his soul 
which marked the beginning of that 
crisis which shapes a man's char- 
acter and determines his fortunes. 
He was rilled with a passionate de- 
sire for silence and solitude ; for the 
detachment and isolation in which 
he might find himself; for he dis- 
covered that though he knew hosts 
of people, he had never met him- 
self face to face. He remembered 
the noble breadth of the landscape 
in the mountain region where John 
Foster lived ; he made his way to 
the little village ; he found an un- 
[108] 













A CHI L I) OF NslT 




occupied house; with a t 
servant and a few hooks he 

the fire on the old hearthstone and 
set himself to search his heart to 
the bottom, to understand his own 

spirit and to learn what tool lite 
meant to put into his hand and 
what work he was to do. 
The silence and loneliness of the 
country oppressed him at first, for 
he had never been alone before ; 
but the splendour of the autumn 
touched his imagination as if some 
great presence, itself unseen, were 
putting on coronation robes. There 
were days of such ripeness and har- 
mony of sky and earth and air that 
it seemed as if Nature were making 
her vast spaces splendid for the en- 
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throning of some invisible spirit. 
In such a radiant calm, with such 
softness brooding over the fields, 
and such majesty sleeping on the 
hills, the stage seemed too noble 
for the setting of human life, with 
its few years and its pathetic uncer- 
tainties. Ralph's thoughts passed 
from himself to the beauty of the 
world, and he began to feel the in- 
ward peace which comes with that 
self-forgetfulness which is the begin- 
ning of self-knowledge. Emptied 
of all egoism, there was room in his 
spirit for Nature, and Nature brought 
her repose, her sanity, her deep un- 
consciousness. It is in such moods 
that the finer influences search and 
it is in such moods, 





A CHILD OF NATURE 




we are not empty and passive, but 
harmonious witb tbe highest and 
truest in thought and life, that the 
great inspirations breathe upon us 
and the invisible chords yield the 
music which appeals to us with the 
warmth and colour and passion of 
the human and the pure and thrill- 
ing intimations of the divine. It 
may have been a fancy, but in that 
mood of sensitiveness to the most 
subtle and delicate influences Ralph 
felt himself touched and quieted by 
the air of the house ; as if within 
those bare walls there lingered 
some spiritual energy which had 
survived the passing of the mortal 
frame from which it issued. This 
may have been fanciful, but the 

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A CHILI) OF NATURE 

impression was so persistent and 
definite that the solitary student 
sought out those who knew the 
earlier occupants of the house, 
and he was not slow to discover 
that among them all his concern 
was with the silent man who, with- 
in a brief half year, had sat before 
the same hearth and looked out 
of the same windows to the hills 
sweeping in a vast circle to the 
north and east. Not much was 
told him, but that little was enough ; 
for the few and hard facts were 
significant, and there was more in 
the silence of those who were ques- 
tioned than in the reports they 
gave. And Ralph's imagination 
was quickened as he recalled the 
[112] 



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A CHILD OF NATURE 










vanished life, and reconstructed the 
image of the vanished personalty, 
by the interpretation of the house 
and garden. The air of the old 
house, mellowed by the long habit 
of a man of hidden genius ; the 
simple furnishings, supplemented 
by the presence of a few books 
o{ the kind which illumine the J\, 
place where thev are gathered and 

a reveal the affinities and interests of 
the spirit to which they have min- 
istered, plied the imagination of 

- the sensitive student who had fallen 
heir to this rich heritage ot simple 
living and high thinking with sub- 
tle but searching hints of a mind to 
which, in its deep repose, the whole 
world of spiritual experience had 

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A CHILD OF NATURE 

ministered. Ralph had travelled far 
and sought truth at the ends of the 
earth ; here had lived and died one 
to whom truth had come by force 
of those deep affinities by which 
the soul reaches out and draws to 
itself the things which are its own. 
When the nights lengthened and 
the world was wrapped in the si- | 
lence of those vast snowfalls which 
descend out of hidden skies with 
a hush that shuts man in with his 
deepest self by the blazing fire, 
the spirit of John Foster seemed 
to pervade the house, as if seeking 
every inlet into a consciousness akin 
to its own, and swift to comprehend | 
what all others had been slow to un- 
derstand. Ralph felt as if a pathetic 



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A CHILD OF NATURE 

appeal were being made from one 

who had found freedom of utter- 
ance alter the long silence of a lite- 
time, but was not quite at rest for 
longing to speak in the language 
of those who thought him dumb 
when his whole nature was aijlow 

o 

with thought and his whole heart 
arlame with love. 




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XIII 



. . . Thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof 
That they were born for immortality. 




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XIII 

IT was in mid-winter — the 
world afar off and his old life 

\} withdrawn and lying like a mist 
on the horizon — that Ralph came 
upon the records of Foster's spirit ; 
the taint and disconnected trac- 
ings ot his inarticulate experience. 
Broken and fragmentary as they 
were he swiftly deciphered them ; 
for the key to their meaning was in 
his mind. He read the loose sheets 
with an interest which deepened 
into passionate sympathy and com- 
prehension ; he retraced Foster's 
long journey through the marvel- 
[ 119] 



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lous world which had gradually un- 
folded about him, noting the broad- 
ening outlook, the clarifying vision, 
the penetrating thought. As he \-jf\ 
read it seemed as if he were living 
again in his own experience this 
hidden life, reaching out in the 
silence of quiet years for the most 
far-reaching kinships with the 
movement of universal thought, and 
bringing itself into deep and final 
harmony with the spiritual order. 
As he penetrated into the secret 
history of this solitary human soul, 
sounding its perilous way without 
companionship across the deeps of 
life, the image of Foster became 
more distinct and real and the path 
he had taken more clear ; until the 
[ I2 °] 





&**J 




A CHILD OF NATURE 

living whs not possessed bv, but in 

possession ot\ the spirit of the dead. 
There was no subjugation ot per- 
sonality, no passive surrender to 
another will ; there was complete 
sympathy and perfect compre- 
hension. 

In Parkman's rich but unrational- 
ised experience the story told by 
Foster's notes was a torch held aloft 
in a dim treasure-house rilled with 
things of priceless value brought 
together from the ends of the earth, 
but lying in contusion, without the 
illumination of order or light. Its 
effect upon his unripe intelligence 
was like the quickening ol the sun 
at the hour when the earth is in a 
passion o{ fertility ; it brought him 

[',2,] 



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A CHILD OF NATURE 




to swift and clear maturity; he 
knew what was in his own spirit, 
he discerned the specific meaning 
of Nature and art and history for 
him, he comprehended his relations 
to the complex world about him, 
and he saw by a lightning flash of 
intelligence what he was to do and 
with what tools he was to work. 
This experience, for a man of his 
type, was not unusual ; sensitive 
spirits, whose growth is completed 
by the extension of the imagination 
to the very limits of knowledge and 
experience, are always coming into 
possession of themselves by the in- 
terpretation of other and more ma- 
ture spirits ; and acquaintance with 
creative minds registers our own 
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A CHIL D 1 NATV R E 

self-development. The constant 

service of Homer, Dante, Shake- 
speare and their fellows is the lib- 
eration which they accomplish in 

other mind-. 

That which was peculiar in Park- 
man's experience and gave it dra- 
matic interot was the resurrection 
of a buried soul which it effected. 
Having discerned the spiritual vis- 
ion, the intellectual richness of Fos- 
ter's life, it became his first duty to 
share these lost treasures with a 
^ world which is never too opulent 
in these ultimate forms of wealth. 
Betore he could uncover the springs 





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t his own genius the disciple felt 



the searching necessity of setting 

forth the teaching of the master. 
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A CHILD OF NATURE 



It was a work of piety and of joy ; 
there was in the doing of it the 
same tender and passionate delight 
which sometimes came to the 
copyist in the scriptorium of the 
monastery when, with rich em- 
bellishment of trailing vine and 
blossoming flower, he gave new 
form to some old scripture ; adding 
nothing which was foreign to the 
text, but evoking its hidden truth in 
fair images and fragrant traceries 
which interpreted to the eye what 
the mind read in the bare lettering. 
In like manner, and with a kindred 
'sgjjj^M joy, Ralph Parkman wrought the 
miracle of resurrection on Joh 
ter's detached and unripe thou 
mere seeds of ideas, hard an 




[ I2 4] 



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A CHILI) OF NJ T i ' R E 

and cold ; and vet husbanding all 
the potentialities of life and beauty 

in them. Upon this rude text 
Parkman worked with the loving 
skill of a monastic >cribe ; and these 

dormant seeds, in the warm soil of 

his imagination, yielded their secret 
and imperishable vitality. 
It was a little book which finally 
went forth in the early summer 
from the old house, but it was very 
deep and beautiful ; like a quiet 
mountain pool, it was tar from the 
dust and tumult oi the highways, 
and there were images oi stars in it. 
With the generosity of a fine spirit, 
the young man interpreted the lite 
of the older man through the rich at- 
mosphere of his own temperament 
[1=5 J 





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A CHILD OF NATURE 

and with the clear vision of his own 
genius ; but there was nothing in 
the beautiful flowering and fruitage 
which the world received from his 
hand which was not potentially in 
the mind and heart of John Foster. 
The silent man had come to his 
own ; for God had given him a 
voice. After the long silence of a 
lifetime he spoke in tones which 
vibrated and penetrated, not like 
great bells swung in unison in some 
high tower, but like dear, familiar 
bells set in old sacred places, whose 
sweet notes are half-audible music 
and half-inaudible faith and prayer 
and worship. At first there were 
few to listen, for the tones were low 
and the noise of the time was great ; 

[126] 



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but in the end every man comes to 



his own, and John Foster found 
here and there one who heard and 
understood ; and as the years went 
In* the few became many, and the 
lite sown in secret bore harvest in 
the wide held of the world. 
And the two never parted com- 
pany ; tor as the horizon be^an to Jf^j 
kindle with Ralph Park man s tame, 
-i there, set like a steady flame, in the 
dawn ot a great new time, men saw 
the star of John Foster's pure and 
radiant spirit. 




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OCT 17 1901 






LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



012 074 882 




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